'Jeepers Creepers: Reborn,' the fourth part of a franchise with a difficult fate, is being released in domestic theaters. About why the latest slasher about ancient evil, stupid youth, and (caution, postmodernism) cosplay culture can be skipped – in...

The first 'Jeepers Creepers' came out in 2001 and restored many people's faith that the classic slasher was still alive (the third part of the great 'Scream' a year earlier had practically buried that faith). It was a good B-movie, directed with a confident hand by Victor Salva, somewhat elevated by the producing involvement of F. F. Coppola and the fact that the Creeper made a rug from his victims, meaning he was a man (an ancient monster) not alien to art.

The second part offered nothing particularly new: a school bus, bewildered teenagers, a sinister Creeper, a dark night. The gloomy poetry of the first film flowed into the 'Dostoevsky lite' of the second, the third part was generally somewhat rustic prose, and far from Shukshin, frankly, while the fourth foray into the universe with the ambitious title 'Jeepers Creepers: Reborn' predictably turned out to be the most ordinary fan fiction. 

Like any fan fiction, 'Jeepers Creepers: Reborn' is not necessarily bad, but it is extremely unnecessary. It begins with a cute sketch about two retirees meeting their not-so-joyful fate in the form of the monster's ill-fated truck on a familiar highway. After such a not-too-well-hidden reference to the original 'Creeper,' we meet the main characters – again a couple, but a young one. 

Chase (Imran Adams), a horror fan and something akin to a TV-3 channel enthusiast, knows everything about the Creeper, has watched three movies about him where everything was distorted (the postmodernist fervor of the authors sometimes knows no bounds), and strives to attend a festival for geeks of the horror world. This coven for fans of 'Halloween' and other wonderful films (you have to be skilled to make such an entertaining event so boring) is held, coincidentally, in places where the Creeper once operated, but Chase, naturally, is only happy about it.

Only his girlfriend Laine (Sydney Craven), a biologist and generally quite rational girl who is also pregnant by the unlucky horror enthusiast, is not happy. This nice couple eventually makes it to the festival, stopping along the way at a souvenir shop owned, characteristically, by a mysterious sorceress. After such a pleasant encounter, Laine begins to be tormented by nightmares about the fate of her unborn child, which seem prophetic, and in the midst of the fan convention, the Creeper appears and once again begins his bloody harvest (a sluggish one).

Craven and Adams try their best; both are, incidentally, decent actors, but almost all of Adams' character's lines start with 'baby' and end with it, which, generally speaking, doesn't help unlock his acting potential, while Laine starts the film as the voice of reason, but somewhere around the middle she completely relies on ominous visions and information from nowhere (though this is what the franchise is known for – there's a psychic in every film, and the characters know more about the Creeper than they should).

A significant part of the action is built on blurry shots of gloomy people in black robes and the characters' attempts to outsmart the Creeper, who, one gets the feeling, couldn't care less about them. But at some point, it becomes clear that old man Creeper is very interested in the young people, and the gothic visions portend very real trouble and even materialize as reality during the hour and a half that the film lasts. The problem is not falling asleep before that moment. 'Jeepers Creepers' has plenty of downsides – it's rather awkwardly shot, its color filters are terrible, the plot can hardly be called even hackneyed (too weak a word) – but the main one is that it's simply uninteresting cinema. 

'Jeepers Creepers: Reborn' is uninteresting for many reasons, mainly because the Creeper, who appeared only twenty years ago (still a kid next to Jason and Michael Myers), has become obsolete so rapidly: his shurikens made of human bones seem archaic, his tendency to resurrect every 23 years seems stupid (first of all, why?), and he himself looks like a relic of an era. He runs slowly, breathes heavily, kills boringly and not very inventively. Throwing a heavy axe into a girl's back is something any physically strong fool can do, if not every fool. Honestly, it's not the Spartakiad.

Roman Kovalev

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The Creeper, as the character Laine says, is tired, and honestly, it shows. It's as if he doesn't even want to kill, is too lazy to hunt, and the most lively and touching moment of the film is when, in the chaos, the Creeper's victims break his favorite vinyl record with Armstrong's song: the melancholic 'Jeepers Creepers, where'd ya get those eyes?' is rudely cut short, the monster looks at his opponents with strange longing and seems to hope that in 23 years, when he has to resurrect again, humanity will have managed to destroy itself.

As if matching his character, director Timo Vuorensola, a Finnish sci-fi original, also disavows any inventiveness: here and there, borrowings from other (good) films flash by, replacing each other. Under the guise of the film 'Jeepers Creepers: Reborn,' we are offered a funny parody of 'Rosemary's Baby,' several allusions to 'Friday the 13th,' shots of the Creeper where he looks terribly like Freddy Krueger, an abundance of references to past parts, and various other unpretentious pleasures. Their culmination is the moment when, closer to the end, the film quite openly turns into 'The Birds,' though it resembles Hitchcock more in concept; overall, it looks like 'Birdpocalypse 3.'

Watching all this is not very interesting; the idea that in the era of postmodernism even real monsters are all the same geek cosplayers, only slightly more convinced of their image, is certainly curious, but also not new. Those who have seen the film 'Friday the 13th Part 4' won't be surprised by this at all, and fans of the film 'Scream' will simply shrug their shoulders. It's especially painful to watch the 'rebirth' of the Creeper if you remember with what elegance and even dignity Jason was resurrected in his time in the sixth 'Friday the 13th,' a pivotal film for slashers. But the eighties ended too long ago — and now we have to watch bad reboots of bad franchises. What can you do, we have to live. More precisely, we have to; the Creeper, well, not so much anymore.